17 Jan 2010
Lists, who needs them (note the absence of a question mark). And why make them? Surely it’s nothing more than a little territorial pissing, to show the world how great and eclectic your musical taste is. They are time consuming, chest beating things that no one needs. Or maybe it’s a kind of closure, to use a nice psychological term. But they are fun to do. So here’s some kind of list of highlights of the year that was, and my one album of the decade.
1) jazz this year, which is like learning a new language. You hear words, some familiar, but mostly weird and strange and foreign. A great help was the English 70’s Jazz Primer that appeared in The Wire some time last year. Normally this would have been way too obscure for me, and I would have skipped it. But one day, I had to wait somewhere and had brought The Wire with me. Eventually I decided to read about English jazz (I mean, wasn’t jazz supposed to be black and American). It was an excellent read, with a few names and links that made sense (Soft Machine, King Crimson). As fate would have it I found an old Nucleus LP (Elastic Rock) in a second hand shop a couple of days later. Nucleus and trompet player Ian Carr were mentioned in the primer, so I bought it and played it. A revelation. It had none of the freaky see how clever we are virtuoso stuff that I dreaded. Instead there was adventurous music, largely understandable to my untrained ear. So from there I went, buying, borrowing, reading, browsing the internet, working my way back from the English jazz(-rock) to the black American experience and picking up some Dutch stuff along the way. So far it has been a great trip, and I do now speak a few words of jazz-lingo.
2) Barney Hoskyns’s Tom Waits biography Low Side Of The Road; A Life of Tom Waits was a great read. The first half, in which we see the rise and getting stuck of Waits as a proto-bohemian Beat, is superb biography. The downside of the book is that Hoskyns describes every single track of every single album, which takes away some of the narrative propulsion. But the really fascinating issue is centered on the question: why do Waits and his wife advise all the people that Hoskyns approaches against speaking to the author. It’s a question that is never really answered, but the email conversations at the end of the book are certainly illuminating. Not sure if I really like Waits that much, after reading the book.
3) Johan broke up. I missed them when they started out in the mid-nineties, or maybe I dismissed them as ‘typical Excelsior fare’. And how I regret. They only made four albums, but two of them (Pergola and ThxJhn) are classics, full of beautiful vibrant yet melancholic pop songs. The fourth (4) was released last year and is a poignant closer to their erratic career. Unfortunately I missed their farewell tour, for which they played a set list that was made up after fans has voted for their favorite Johan tune. Just for the record: mine is Day Is Done.
4) Uncuts or Mojo’s do you want with yet another Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd on the cover? Does this scraping the 60s and 70s mean that young bands have too little to say? And what does this mean for Uncut and Mojo in ten years time? Anyway, the internet partly made up for the main mags letting us down. My favorite blog this year was PHROCK, which specializes in obscure and less obscure and idiosyncratic and rare rock, with a preference for psychedelic sounds from the distant past. Every album that is featured comes with an extensive description and great downloads. Other favorites: Radiobutt for contemporary music, ABC Afterglow for Brit pop, punk and beat (wow, how I like The Rifles), and Ratboy69 for the more garagey bands.
5) The Low Anthem’s performance at the Crossing Borders festival in The Hague. Weird instruments, delicate harmonies and furious shouting, as if things might fall apart any second. But they never did.
6) XX by The XX, the ferocious rock of The Gaslight Anthem on The 59 Sound, and the old fashioned (in a good sense) song writing on Oh My God Charlie Darwin by The Low Anthem. I also discovered the tortured songs of Sam Baker. And then there was the glorious noise of A Place To Bury Strangers and the folky pop of She Swings, She Sways. And was Stephen Malkmus Face The Truth last year’s? There was a very interesting The Kinks box set, which according to some critics had too much post-70s music, but I didn’t really mind. Equally fascinating was the box set of The Band, a band that I always had largely ignored, much to my own detriment, the box proved. And finally, there was a superb box set that collected the early Los Angeles psychedelic scene, Where the Action is.
7) Cat Power didn’t make a new album. But then, with You Are Free she made my album of the decade. Too sad for words. The soundtrack to a break-up, full of wounds and hurt. It ranks out there with eternal albums by Joy Division (Unknown Pleasures), The Replacements (Let It Be), Einstürzende Neubauten (Silence is Sexy), Neil Young (On The Beach), Velvet Underground (Third Album).
PS Oh, and I totally forgot Rotterdam poet, jazz man Jules Deelder, who despite his narcotic habit turned the very respectable age of 65 and released a 10 inch lp to celebrate the occasion. It contains a couple of songs/poems that no one should miss: Jazz is, De Slag Om de Beurstrappen and the touching, unusually melancholic Ari. Here's looking at you Jules!